Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

transistor radio, sheathed in stippled orange plastic. So in between excursions to electrical utopias populated by heroes and villains and princesses disguised as milkmaids, they listened to the Top Forty, and under the blankets, they sang along. When they investigated how the radio worked, it seemed that, like other technologies, it captured the invisible currents of the air. Voices caught roiling sound waves, surfed into the tightly coiled wires of plastic boxes, spun in sparky rings, then emanated gloriously as hits. Origins, properties, functions, destinations: the universe had within it all these regions of vigorous activity, all these gymnastical stretchings and curvings and changings of form. Alice had seen on television how girls no larger than she flew into aerial contortions and abnormal design; it seemed to her impeccable child-logicthat there must be ways, or devices, by which all of us might find this hidden motion and elastic space, this land of mutable forces, of turbulent speed, of sheer mechanical wonder.
    James was less convinced. ‘You need to know things,’ he said. ‘This is not for everyone. Only special people’, he explained, ‘see the inside of things.’
    One day a nurse came by unexpectedly and found James and Alice in bed together. With a violence that was rapid, fierce and entirely instinctual, she seized Alice by the elbow, yanked her from the bed, and with a wide sudden swing slapped the left side of her face. Alice felt a quake within her skull and a hand-sized pain. She fell to the floor, hurt, but was too stunned to cry.
    â€˜Don’t you ever,’ the nurse said tensely, ‘don’t you ever use the same bed again.’
    She had grey hair under her cap, fashioned in tight, unnatural curls. She wore an upside-down watch and a badge that said ‘BARKER’.
    James looked pale with fear. He was stammering an explanation: ‘We were only …’
    But the nurse was not listening. She lifted Alice in a rough bear hug and forcibly dumped her on her own bed.
    When Alice developed a swollen black eye and a purple bruise across her cheek, the explanation was that she had awoken at night, was confused, had tangled in her sheets, and fallen from her bed. Norah looked upset behind the glass. Her oval face was on the verge of tearful collapse and Alice saw her touch her own cheek in a kind of signal of compassion. She would tell her, one day, about BARKER, about the radio. It would be a secret they could share.
    Alice and James returned to calling across the room. They shouted paragraphs of story and details from How Does it Work ?. When Alice complained she could not quite hear the radio,James sent it sailing towards her, over the three empty beds between them, as a kind of high-flying gift. But the radio fell short of its target and crashed just below Alice’s bed. She saw its plastic case split open into two neat halves, and its coppery and silvery components, broken and revealed. At this point both children began to cry. In the cohesion of their little world, in reverence for the orange plastic box that was their symbol of modern magic, they heartily wailed. No grey-haired nurse came running to strike or reprove them. So they each made the most of their intelligent woe, finding in their tears an approximate expression of all that their illness, and their closeness, and their mean separation, had meant.

    In the supermarket, at the checkout, a north African woman of extraordinary beauty was passing Alice’s groceries across the scanning machine. She appeared bored and exhausted and did not look at her customers. Alice had had this job once, as a student, part time. She understood why a woman might wish to serve in this way, immured, aloof, offering no courtesy. When she announced the charge and accepted the money, she still did not look up; something burdensome weighed on her, something more than just tiredness. Numbers appeared and disappeared in